PESTIEAU Pierre

This paper studies the political sustainability of programs that are targeted towards the poor. Given that the poor to whom these programs cater do not constitute a majority, we show that for their own good it pays to let the middle class benefit from them in a random way. This approach mimics the actual institutional arrangements whereby middle-class individuals feel that they can successfully apply to the programs. We consider a two stage decision process: first a Rawlsian government chooses the probability at which the middle class is allowed to benefit from a given program. then, majority voting determines the level of benefit and the rate of contribution. At the first, constitutional stage, the government cannot commit to a specific level of taxes and benefit but anticipates that these are set by majority voting in the second stage.

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We study the design of a fair family policy in an economy where parent- hood is regarded either as desirable or as undesirable, and where there is imperfect fertility control, leading to involuntary childlessness/parenthood. Using an equivalent consumption approach in the consumption-fertility space, we .rst show that the identi.cation of the worst-o¤ individuals is not robust to how the social evaluator .xes the reference fertility level. Adopting the ex post egalitarian social criterion, which gives priority to the worst o¤ in realized terms, we then examine the compensation for involuntary childlessness/parenthood. Unlike real-world family policies, a fair family policy does not always involve positive family allowances to (voluntary) parents, and may also, under some reference fertility lev- els, involve positive childlessness allowances. Our results are robust to assuming asymmetric information and to introducing Assisted Reproduc- tive Technologies.

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Higher mortality among the poor prevents standard poverty measures from quantifying the actual extent of old-age poverty. Whereas existing attempts to deal with the ”missing poor” problem assume the absence of income mobility and assign to the prematurely dead a fictitious income equal to the last income enjoyed, this paper relaxes that assumption in order to study the impact of income mobility on the size of the missing poor bias. We use data on poverty above age 60 in 12 countries from the EU-SILC database, and we compare standard poverty rates with the hypothetical poverty rates that would have prevailed if (i) all individuals, whatever their income, had enjoyed the same survival conditions, and if (ii) all individuals within the same income class had been subject to the same income mobility process. Taking income mobility into account has unequal effects on corrected poverty measures across countries, and, hence, affects international comparisons in terms of old-age poverty.

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We examine the e¤ects of the postulated metric on the measurement of well-being, by comparing, in the (income, lifetime) space, two indexes: the equivalent income index and the equivalent lifetime index. Those in- dexes are shown to satisfy di¤erent properties concerning interpersonal well-being comparisons, which can lead to contradictory rankings. While those incompatibilities arise under distinct indi¤erence maps, we also ex- plore the e¤ects of the metric while relying on a unique indi¤erence map, and show that, even in that case, the postulated metric matters for the measurement of well-being. That point is illustrated by quantifying, by those two indexes, the (average) well-being loss due to the Syrian War. Relying on a particular metric leads, from a quantitative perspective, to di¤erent pictures of the deprivation due to the War.

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Following Kanbur and Mukherjee (Bull Econ Res 59(4):339–359 2007), a solution to the “missing poor” problem (i.e., selection bias in poverty measures due to income-differentiated mortality) consists in computing hypothetical poverty rates while assigning a fictitious income to the prematurely dead. However, in a dynamic general equilibrium economy, doing “as if” the prematurely dead were still alive is likely to affect wages, output and capital accumulation, with an uncertain effect on poverty. We develop a three-period OLG model with income-differentiated mortality and compare actual poverty rates with hypothetical poverty rates that would have prevailed if everyone faced the survival conditions of the top income class. Including the prematurely dead has an ambiguous impact on poverty, since it affects income distribution through capital dilution, composition effects, and horizon effects. Our results are illustrated by quantifying the impact of income-differentiated mortality on poverty measures for France (1820–2010).

One of the pervasive problems with means-tested public long-term care programs is their inability to prevent individuals who could afford private long-term services from taking advantage of public care. They often manage to elude the means-test net through ‘strategic impoverishment’. We show in a simple model how this problem comes about, how it affects welfare and how it can be mitigated.

This article analyzes the main risks associated with aging and how to prevent them. These risks are those of a life that is too long and not financed, of illness, of loss of autonomy, of institutional or family mistreatment and finally of impecuniosity.

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We develop a 3-period overlapping generations (OLG) model where individuals borrow at the young age in order to finance their education. Education does not only increase future wages, but also raises the duration of life, which, in turn, can affect education, in line with Ben-Porath (1967). We examine the conditions under which the Ben-Porath effect prevails. Although the existence of a positive Ben-Porath effect requires, under exogenous longevity, a change in lifetime hours of work, we find, under endogenous longevity, that a positive Ben-Porath effect arises even when old-age labor is fixed. It is also shown that the Ben-Porath effect may not be robust to allowing for adjustments in production factor prices. On the policy side, we show that the social optimum can be decentralized provided the capital stock is set to the Modified Golden Rule level. Finally, we introduce intracohort heterogeneity in learning ability, and we show that, under asymmetric information, the second-best optimal non-linear tax scheme involves a downward distortion in the education of less able types, which reinforces the longevity gap in comparison with the first-best.

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When family assistance is uncertain, benefits cannot be conditioned on family aid. We study the role of private and public LTC insurance in this environment and compare the properties and optimality of the topping up versus opting out public insurance schemes. Under topping up, the required LTC is less than full insurance and should be provided publicly unless private insurance market for dependency is fair. With an opting out scheme, there will be three possible equilibria depending on the children's degree of altruism. These imply: full LTC insurance with no aid from children, less than full insurance just enough to induce aid, and full insurance with aid. Fair private insurance can support only the first equilibrium. Opting out policies are self-targeted and dominate topping up schemes when the degree of children's altruism is sufficiently large. However, when the degree of altruism is small the dominance goes in the opposite direction.

Income-differentiated mortality, by reducing the share of poor persons in the population, leads to the “Mortality Paradox”: the worse the survival conditions of the poor are, the lower is the measured poverty. We show that FGT measures (Foster et al., 1984) are, in general, not robust to variations in survival conditions. Then, following Kanbur and Mukherjee (2007), we propose to adjust FGT poverty measures by extending the income profiles of the prematurely dead, and we identify the condition under which so-adjusted FGT measures are robust to mortality changes. Finally, we show, on the basis of data from 2007 on old-age poverty in 11 European economies, that the effect of extending income profiles of the prematurely dead on poverty measurement varies with: (1) the fictitious income assigned to the prematurely dead. (2) the degree of poverty aversion. (3) the shape of the (unadjusted) income distribution. and (4) the strength of the income/mortality relationship.

The welfare state has never been so decried as it is today, even though it has probably never been so necessary. The criticisms it faces come from those who want to reduce its size as well as from those who find it incapable of fulfilling its main missions. The multiple social fractures that have led a part of the population to doubt the policies that are supposed to help them, and to end up voting populist, give new justification to a more efficient welfare state that is concerned with bridging the gap between a part of the population that is socially integrated and the one that is excluded. This is the perspective from which this book is written. It begins by presenting a social portrait of European countries, focusing on France. It analyzes the performance of their welfare states in the face of obstacles called "globalization" and "individualism. He then discusses the main areas where he can and should take action: health, employment, retirement and family. He concludes by proposing a number of concrete recommendations.

This paper uses an equivalent income approach to quantify the domestic welfare loss due to the Syrian Civil War. Focusing on the (income, life expectancy) space, we show that the equivalent income has fallen by about 60 % in comparison to the pre-conflict level. We also find that the differential between the equivalent income and the standard income for 2016 lies between $75 and $144. Although this low willingness to pay for coming back to pre-conflict survival conditions can be explained by extreme poverty due to the War, the small gap between standard and equivalent incomes tends to question the extra value brought by the latter for the measurement of standards of living in situations of severe poverty. We examine some solutions to that puzzle, including a more general specification of the utility function, the shift from an ex ante approach (valuing changes in life expectancy) to an ex post approach (valuing changes in distributions of realized longevities), as well as considering population ethical aspects. None of those solutions is fully successful in solving the puzzle.

The purpose of this paper is to test alternative models of long-term caring motives. We consider three main motives: pure altruism, exchange and family norm. Our database is the second wave of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) which allows linking almost perfectly and with complete information children and their parents’ characteristics. Comparing the empirical results to the theoretical models developed, it appears that, depending on the regions analyzed, long-term caring is driven by moderate altruism or by family norm, while Alessie et al. (De Economist 162(2):193–213, 2014), also using SHARE data, stress the importance of exchange motive in intergenerational transfers.

Long-term care (LTC) needs are expected to rapidly increase in the next decades, and at the same time, the main provider of LTC, namely the family, is stalling. This calls for more involvement of the state that today covers <20% of these needs and most often in an inconsistent way. Besides the need to help the dependent poor, there is a mounting concern in the middle class that a number of dependent people are incurring costs that could force them to sell all their assets. In this paper, we study the design of a social insurance program that meets this concern. Following Arrow (Am Econ Rev 53:941–973, 1963), we suggest a policy that is characterized by complete insurance above a deductible amount.

Higher mortality among the poor leads to selection biases in poverty measures. Whereas existing attempts to deal with the "missing poor" problem assume the absence of income mobility and assign to the prematurely dead a …ctitious income equal to the last income enjoyed, this paper relaxes that assumption in order to study the impact of income mobility on the size of the missing poor bias. We use data on poverty above age 60 in 12 countries from the EU-SILC database, and we compare standard poverty rates with the hypothetical poverty rates that would have pre- vailed if (i) all individuals, whatever their income, had enjoyed the same survival conditions (the ones of the highest income class), and if (ii) all individuals within the same income class had been subject to the same income mobility process. It is shown that taking income mobility into ac- count has adverse effects on corrected poverty measures across countries, and that it affects international comparisons in terms of old-age poverty.

While little agreement exists regarding the taxation of bequests in general, there is a widely held view that accidental bequests should be subject to a confi…scatory tax. We propose to reexamine the optimal taxation of accidental bequests in an economy where individuals care about what they leave to their offspring in case of premature death. We show that, whereas the conventional 100 % tax view holds under the standard utilitarian social welfare criterion, it does not hold under the ex post egalitarian criterion, which assigns a strong weight to the welfare of unlucky short-lived individuals. From an egalitarian perspective, it is optimal not to tax, but to subsidize accidental bequests. We examine the robustness of those results in a dynamic OLG model of wealth accumulation, and show that, whereas the sign of the optimal tax on accidental bequests depends on the form of the joy of giving motive, it remains true that the 100 % tax view does not hold under the ex post egalitarian criterion.

A premature death unexpectedly brings a life and a career to their end, leading to substantial welfare losses. We study the retirement decision in an economy with risky lifetime and compare the laissez-faire with egalitarian social optima. We consider two social objectives: (1) the maximin on expected lifetime welfare, allowing for a compensation for unequal life expectancies, and (2) the maximin on realized lifetime welfare, allowing for a compensation for unequal lifetimes. The latter optimum involves, in general, decreasing lifetime consumption profiles as well as raising the retirement age. This result is robust to the introduction of unequal life expectancies and unequal productivities.

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This paper studies the design of a social long-term care (LTC) insurance when altruism is two-sided. The laissez-faire solution is not efficient, unless there is perfect altruism. Under full information, the first-best can be decentralized by a linear subsidy on informal aid, a linear tax on bequests when the parent is dependent and state specific lump-sum transfers which provide insurance. We also study a second-best scheme comprising a LTC benefit, a payroll tax on children's earnings and an inheritance tax. This scheme redistributes resources across individuals and between the states of nature and the tax on children's labor enhances informal care to compensate for the children's possible less than full altruism.

This thesis proposes evaluations of recent reforms of the French pension system, using two distinct and complementary approaches: ex post evaluation by microeconometrics and ex ante evaluation by microsimulation. An introductory chapter provides a review of the literature on the effect of the pension system on activity behavior. Next, we use the reforms of the mandatory retirement scheme in the 2000s to identify an effect of labor demand on labor market withdrawal behavior. We then assess the effect of the increase in the minimum retirement age introduced by the 2003 reform. We study the effects of the reform on employment after the age of 60, but also the potential substitution effects towards other public schemes, in particular unemployment insurance.The second part of this thesis, devoted to the evaluation by microsimulation, opens with a presentation of the approach applied to retirement and its use in French models. First, we propose an evaluation of the increase in the duration of insurance provided for by the 2003 reform. The principle of maintaining a constant ratio between the duration of working life and the duration of retirement is questioned, and then compared with the changes projected in simulation using the INSEE'sDestinie model. Finally, we use the Institute of Public Policy's Pensipp model to simulate new reform options that would reduce the pension system's dependence on growth and the uncertainty about its financial balance.

Should pension provisions differ by occupation? We study the optimality of allowing the pension policies to differ by occupation when individuals differ in longevity and occupation, longevity is private information but occupation is observable. There is a case for differentiating the pension policy by occupation when longevity is (imperfectly) correlated with occupation. The short-lived workers in the safe occupation are however made worse-off, more so when the social objective includes a higher social weight on short-lived individuals to redress the implicit bias towards long-lived that the unweighted utilitarian objective entails. The maximin criterion ensures equal utility for short-lived workers regardless of occupation but those in the safe occupation consume the most when young, the least when old and retire the earliest. This is achieved by taxing – often quite heavily – their savings and their earnings from prolonged activity.

In the so-called Rapport Sauvy (1962), the French demographer Alfred Sauvy argued that Wallonia’s fertility rate was socially suboptimal, and recommended a 20 % rise of fertility, on the grounds that a society with too low a fertility leads to a low-productive economy composed of old workers having old ideas. This paper examines how Sauvy’s intuition can be incorporated in the Samuelsonian optimal fertility model (Samuelson, Int Econ Rev 16:531–538, 1975). We build a four-period OLG model with physical capital and with two generations of workers (young and old), the skills of the latter being subject to some form of decay. We characterize the optimal fertility rate and show that this equalizes, at the margin, the sum of the capital dilution effect (Solow effect) and the labour age-composition effect (Sauvy effect) with the intergenerational redistribution effect (Samuelson effect). Numerical simulations show that it is hard, from a quantitative perspective, to reconcile Sauvy’s recommendation with facts. This leads us to examine other potential determinants of optimal fertility, by introducing technological progress and a more general social welfare function.

Life expectancy at birth has more than doubled in Europe since the early 19th century. This demographic trend constitutes a major victory against scarcity, but raises also deep challenges to the Welfare State, concerning the sustainability and the equity of the social protection system. This paper surveys recent developments in the economic analysis of longevity, both at the positive and the normative levels. Taking mortality risks into account is shown to affect the study of the life cycle model significantly, in particular concerning the strength of life horizon effects. It raises also, at the level of normative foundations for policy-making, a dilemma between ex ante and ex post valuations. Finally, we explore the design of policy reforms under varying longevity, in fields including preventive and curative policies, education, pension, and wealth taxation.

Due to the aging process, the provision of long-term care (LTC) to the dependent elderly has become a major challenge of our epoch. But our societies are also characterized, since the 1970s, by a postponement of births, which, by raising the intergenerational age gap, can affect the provision of LTC by children. In order to examine the impact of those demographic trends on the optimal policy, we develop a four-period OLG model where individuals, who receive children's informal LTC at the old age, must choose, when being young, how to allocate births along their life cycle. It is shown that, in line with empirical evidence, early children provide more LTC to their elderly parents than do late children, because they face a lower opportunity cost of providing LTC. When comparing the laissez-faire with the long-run social optimum, it appears that individuals have, at the laissez-faire, too few early births, and too many late births. We then study, in first-best and second-best settings, how the social optimum can be decentralized by encouraging early births, in such a way as to reduce the social burden of LTC provision.

The rising level of long-term care (LTC) expenditures and their financing sources are likely to impact savings and capital accumulation and henceforth the pattern of growth. This paper studies how the joint interaction of the family, the market and the State influences capital accumulation and welfare in a society in which the assistance the children give to dependent parents is triggered by a family norm. We find that with a family norm in place, the dynamics of capital accumulation differ from those of a standard Diamond (Am Econ Rev 55:1126–1150, 1965) model with dependence. For instance, if the family help is sizeably more productive than other LTC financing sources, pay-as-you-go social insurance might be a complement to private insurance and foster capital accumulation.

In this article, we study the impact of differences in longevity on the design of public policies, particularly those related to retirement. First, we show that even though life expectancy has increased dramatically over the last century, large disparities remain. Second, we study from a normative point of view how differences in longevity are generally taken into account in life-cycle models and show that certain assumptions can have strong implications in terms of intragenerational redistribution. We identify at least three arguments in favor of redistribution to agents with low longevity: multi-period inequality aversion, mortality risk aversion, and compensation for characteristics for which agents are not responsible. We then extend our analysis to take into account the fact that individuals may be partly responsible for their longevity.Finally, we link these results to current debates on pension system reform. We show that, in general, because pensions are conditional on the survival of beneficiaries, public pension systems will redistribute resources from short-lived agents to long-lived ones. We provide suggestions for reforms that would aim to take better account of these differences in longevity and, in particular, those relating to the creation of a "longevity annuity" as desired by the Comité d'Amours and to the development of independent insurance, whether private or public.

This paper studies how the risk of divorce affects the human capital decisions of a young couple. We consider a setting where complete specialization is optimal with no divorce risk. Couples can self-insure through savings which offers some protection to the uneducated spouse, but at the expense of a distortion. Alternatively, for large divorce probabilities, symmetry in education, where both spouses receive an equal amount of education, may be optimal. This eliminates the risk associated with the lack of education, but reduces the efficiency of education choices. We show that the symmetric allocation will become more attractive as the probability of divorce increases, if risk aversion is high and/or labor supply elasticity is low. However, it is only a “second-best” solution as insurance protection is achieved at the expense of an efficiency loss. Finally, we study how the (economic) use of marriage is affected by the possibility of divorce.

We develop a 3-period overlapping generations (OLG) model where individuals borrow at the young age to finance their education. Education does not only increase future wages, but, also, raises the duration of life, which, in turn, affects education choices, in line with Ben Porath (1967). We first identify conditions that guarantee the existence of a stationary equilibrium with perfect foresight. Then, we reexamine the conditions under which the Ben-Porath effect prevails, and emphasize the impact of human capital decay and preferences. We compare the laissez-faire with the social optimum, and show that the latter can be decentralized provided the laissez-faire capital stock corresponds to the one satisfying the modified Golden Rule. Finally, we introduce intracohort heterogeneity in the learning ability, and we show that, under asymmetric information, the second-best optimal non-linear tax scheme involves a downward distortion in the level of education of less able types, which, quite paradoxically, would reinforce the longevity gap in comparison with the laissez-faire.

Due to the ageing process, the provision of long-term care (LTC) to the dependent elderly has become a major challenge of our epoch. But at the same time, our societies are characterized, since the 1970s, by a significant postponement of births. This paper aims at examining the impact of those demographic trends on the optimal family policy. We develop a four-period OLG model where individuals, who receive children's informal LTC at the old age, must choose, when being young, how to allocate births along their lifecycle. It is shown that early children provide more LTC to their elderly parents than late children, because of the lower opportunity cost of providing LTC when being retired. In comparison with the social optimum, individuals have, at the laissez-faire, too few children early in their life, and too many later on in their life. The decentralization of the first-best optimum requires thus to subsidize early births. We study also the design of the optimal subsidy on early births in a second-best setting. Its level depends on efficiency and equity issues, as well as on its incidence on the long-run population composition and on LTC provision.

We provide an explanation for why estate taxation is surprisingly little used over the world, given the skewness of the estate distribution. Taxing estates implies meddling with intra-family decisions, which may be frown upon by many. At the same time, the concentration of estates means that a low proportion of the population stands to gain a lot by decreasing estate taxation. We provide an analytical model, together with numerical simulations, where agents bequeathing large estates make monetary contributions that are used to play up the salience of the encroachment aspects of estate taxation on family decisions in order to decrease its political support.

We study the role of social long-term care (LTC) insurance when income taxation and private insurance markets are imperfect. Policy instruments include public provision of LTC as well as a subsidy on private insurance. The subsidy scheme may be linear or nonlinear. For the linear part we consider an arbitrary number of types, characterized by earnings and survival probabilities. In the nonlinear part, society consists of three types: poor, middle class and rich. The first type is too poor to provide for dependence. the middle class type purchases private insurance and the high income type is self-insured. The main questions are at what level LTC should be provided to the poor and whether it is desirable to subsidize private LTC for the middle class. Interestingly, the results are not totally similar under both linear and nonlinear schemes. First, whereas in the linear case a subsidy of private LTC insurance is desirable, it is not in the nonlinear case (at least at the margin). Second, the desirability of public provision of LTC services depends on the way the income tax is restricted. In the linear case, it may be desirable only if no demogrant (uniform lump-sum transfer) is available. In the nonlinear case, public provision is desirable when the income tax is sufficiently restricted. Specifically, this is the case when the income is subject only to a proportional payroll tax while the LTC reimbursement policy can be nonlinear.

This paper studies how the risk of divorce affects the human capital decisions of a young couple. We consider a setting where complete specialization is optimal with no divorce risk. Couples can self-insure through savings which offers some protection to the uneducated spouse, but at the expense of a distortion. Alternatively, for large divorce probabilities, symmetry in education, where both spouses receive an equal amount of education, may be optimal. This eliminates the risk associated with the lack of education, but reduces the efficiency of education choices. We show that the symmetric allocation will become more attractive as the probability of divorce increases, if risk aversion is high and/or labor supply elasticity is low. However, it is only a "second-best" solution as insurance protection is achieved at the expense of an efficiency loss. Finally, we study how the (economic) use of marriage is affected by the possibility of divorce.

In this article, we study the impact of differences in longevity on the design of public policies, particularly those related to retirement. First, we show that even though life expectancy has increased dramatically over the last century, large disparities remain. Second, we study from a normative point of view how differences in longevity are generally taken into account in life-cycle models and show that certain assumptions can have strong implications in terms of intra-generational redistribution. We identify at least three arguments in favor of redistribution to agents with low longevity: aversion to intertemporal inequality, aversion to mortality risk, and compensation for characteristics for which agents are not responsible. We then extend our analysis to account for the fact that individuals may be, in part, responsible for their longevity. Finally, we link these results to current debates on pension reform. We show that, in general, because pensions are conditional on the survival of beneficiaries, public pension systems will redistribute resources from short-lived agents to long-lived ones. We provide suggestions for reforms that would aim to take better account of these differences in longevity, and in particular, those relating to the creation of a "longevity annuity" as desired by the Comité d'Amours and the development of independent insurance, whether private or public.

In times of economic crisis, the needs of the State increase and the tax base shrinks. It is therefore common to see the fight against the various forms of fraud that reduce public revenues resurface in the public debate. In this context, tax fraud is regularly contrasted with social fraud and the discussion often focuses on the relative importance of the two. Tax fraud is the illegal misuse of a tax system in order to avoid contributing to the financing of public expenses, and social fraud is the evasion of social security deductions or the undue receipt of social benefits. The two forms of fraud sometimes overlap. Although it is difficult to measure precisely the two forms of fraud, it is generally estimated that tax fraud represents a much greater loss of revenue for the State than social fraud. However, it is important to note that these two types of fraud certainly emanate from populations with different characteristics in terms of activity and resources. It is therefore interesting to try to identify the explanatory factors of these two types of fraud, to know if they respond to the same economic springs and moral imperatives. Populations or groups are often stigmatized for practicing one or the other type of fraud. This article proposes to explain the factors leading to these two types of fraud, based on data obtained from a laboratory experiment. Because of its control requirements and its artificiality, laboratory experimentation can contribute to providing some answers. Indeed, by choosing appropriate parameter values, it allows for a direct comparison of the two types of fraud from an economic point of view in order to isolate the non-economic dimensions of decision-making.

This letter analyzes the impact of economic integration on capital accumulation and capital flows when countries differ in their social security systems. Funding and early retirement both foster capital accumulation relative to pay-as-you-go pensions with flexible retirement. When economies integrate, both imply capital outflow possibly resulting in utility losses.

This paper shows how the role of the market, the state and the family in providing old-age support has evolved over time with changes in factors such as the reliability and the effectiveness of family support, the interest rate, the cost of public funds, and earning inequality. Agents with different productivity vote over the size of a Beveridgian pension system. When children assistance is certain, agents may rely exclusively on family and prefer no pension. However, when the size and the probability of family generosity decrease, social security is more likely to emerge.

Parenthood postponement is a key demographic trend of the last three decades. In order to rationalize that stylized fact, we extend the canonical model by Barro and Becker (Econometrica 57:481–501, 1989) to include two—instead of one—reproduction periods. We examine how the cost structure of early and late children in terms of time and goods affects the optimal fertility timing. Then, we identify conditions that guarantee the existence and uniqueness of a stationary equilibrium with a stationary cohort size. Finally, we examine how the model can rationalize the observed postponement of births, and we highlight two plausible causes: (1) a general rise in the cost of children in terms of goods and (2) a decline in the degree of family altruism.

In the presence of differential mortality by income, standard measures of poverty do not only capture true poverty, but also reflect the selection process induced by differential mortality. One solution to this type of selection bias is to extend the income profiles of the prematurely deceased to include them in the poverty measure using a dummy income. The present study proposes to analyze the effect of age on the size of the selection bias. To this end, we exploit age-specific poverty data in Belgium and compare conventional poverty measures with adjusted poverty measures obtained by extending the income profiles of the prematurely deceased. We show that, although the gap between adjusted and unadjusted measures is larger at higher ages of life, selection bias is nevertheless present at all ages.

We experimentally study how receiving information about tax compliance of others affects individuals’ occupational choices and subsequent evading decisions. In one treatment individuals receive information about the highest tax evasion rates of others in past experimental sessions with no such social information. in another treatment they receive information about the lowest tax evasion rates observed in the past sessions with no such social information. We observe an asymmetric effect of social information on tax compliance. Whereas examples of high compliance do not have any disciplining effect, we find evidence that examples of low compliance significantly increase tax evasion for certain audit probabilities. No major differences are found across countries.

A premature death unexpectedly brings a life and a career to their end, leading to substantial welfare losses. We study the retirement decision in an economy with risky lifetime, and compare the laissez-faire with egalitarian social optima. We consider two social objectives: (1) the maximin on expected lifetime welfare (ex ante), allowing for a compensation for unequal life expectancies. (2) the maximin on realized lifetime welfare (ex post), allowing for a compensation for unequal lifetimes. The latter optimum involves, in general, decreasing lifetime consumption profiles, as well as raising the retirement age, unlike the ex ante egalitarian optimum. This result is robust to the introduction of unequal life expectancies and unequal productivities. Hence, the postponement of the retirement age can, quite surprisingly, be defended on egalitarian grounds --although the conclusion is reversed when mortality strikes only after retirement.

We study the role of social long-term care (LTC) insurance when income taxation and private insurance markets are imperfect. Policy instruments include public provision of LTC as well as a subsidy on private insurance. The subsidy scheme may be linear or nonlinear. For the linear part we consider an arbitrary number of types, characterized by earnings and survival probabilities. In the nonlinear part, society consists of three types: poor, middle class and rich. The first type is too poor to provide for dependence. the middle class type purchases private insurance and the high income type is self-insured. The main questions are at what level LTC should be provided to the poor and whether it is desirable to subsidize private LTC for the middle class. Interestingly, the results are not totally similar under both linear and nonlinear schemes. First, whereas in the linear case a subsidy of private LTC insurance is desirable, it is not in the nonlinear case (at least at the margin). Second, the desirability of public provision of LTC services depends on the way the income tax is restricted. In the linear case, it may be desirable only if no demogrant (uniform lump-sum transfer) is available. In the nonlinear case, public provision is desirable when the income tax is sufficiently restricted. Specifically, this is the case when the income is subject only to a proportional payroll tax while the LTC reimbursement policy can be nonlinear.

This paper studies public provision of long-term care insurance in a world in which family assistance is (i) uncertain and (ii) endogenous, depending on the time parents spend raising their children. Public benefits will be paid in case of disability but cannot be combined with self-insurance or family aid. The benefits are provided equally to all recipients and financed by a proportional payroll tax. The paper shows that tax distortions imply that full insurance is undesirable. It characterizes the optimal tax and identifies the elements that determine its size. Of crucial importance are the extent of under-insurance, the effect of the tax on the probability of altruism, the distortionary effect of the tax, and, with wage heterogeneity, the covariance between the social marginal utility of lifetime income and (i) earnings (positive effect) and (ii) the probability of altruism default (negative effect).

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Under income-differentiated mortality, poverty measures reflect not only the "true" poverty, but, also, the interferences or noise caused by the survival process at work. Such interferences lead to the Mortality Paradox: the worse the survival conditions of the poor are, the lower the measured poverty is. We examine several solutions to avoid that paradox. We identify conditions under which the extension, by means of a fictitious income, of lifetime income profiles of the prematurely dead neutralizes the noise due to differential mortality. Then, to account not only for the "missing" poor, but, also, for the "hidden" poverty (premature death), we use, as a fictitious income, the welfare-neutral income, making indifferent between life continuation and death. The robustness of poverty measures to the extension technique is illustrated with regional Belgian data.

We explore the optimal fertility timing in a four-period OLG economy with physical capital, whose specificity is to include not one, but two reproduction periods. It is shown that, for a given total fertility rate, the economy exhibits quite different dynamics, depending on the timing of births. If all births take place in the late reproduction period, there exists no stable stationary equilibrium and the economy exhibits cyclical dynamics due to labor growth fluctuations. We characterize the long-run social optimum and show that optimal consumptions and capital depend on the optimal cohort growth factor, so that there is no one-to-one substitutability between early and late fertility. We also extend Samuelson's Serendipity Theorem to our economy and study the robustness of our results to: (1) endogenizing fertility timing, (2) assuming rational anticipations about factor prices, (3) adding a third reproduction period.

Although the optimal public policy under an endogenous number of children has been widely studied, the optimal public intervention under an endogenous timing of births has remained largely unexplored. This paper examines the optimal family policy when the timing of births is chosen by individuals who differ as to how early fertility weakens future earnings. We analyze the design of a policy of family allowances and of public pensions in such a setting, under distinct informational environments. Endogenous childbearing ages is shown to affect the optimal policy through the redistribution across the earnings dimension and the internalization of fertility externalities. Contrary to common practice, children benefits differentiated according to the age of parents can be part of the optimal family policy. Our results are robust to introducing: (i) children as durable "goods". (ii) education choices. (iii) varying total fertility.

Our societies are witnessing a steady increase in longevity. This demographic evolution is accompanied by some convergence across countries, whereas substantial longevity inequalities persist within nations. The goal of this article is to survey some crucial implications of changing longevity on the design of optimal public policy. For that purpose, we first focus on some difficulties raised by risky and varying lifetime for the representation of individual and social preferences. Then, we explore some central implications of changing longevity for optimal policy making, regarding prevention against premature death, pension policies, and long-term care.

In times of economic crisis, the needs of the State increase and the tax base shrinks. it is therefore common to see the fight against the various forms of fraud that reduce public revenue resurface in the public debate. In this context, tax fraud is regularly contrasted with social fraud and the discussion often focuses on the relative importance of the two. Tax fraud is defined as the illegal misuse of a tax system in order to avoid contributing to the financing of public expenses, and social fraud is defined as the evasion of social security contributions or the undue receipt of social benefits. The two forms of fraud sometimes overlap. Although it is difficult to measure precisely the two forms of fraud, it is generally estimated that tax fraud represents a much greater loss of revenue for the State than social fraud. However, it is important to note that these two types of fraud certainly emanate from populations with different characteristics in terms of activity and resources. It is therefore interesting to try to identify the explanatory factors of these two types of fraud, to know if they respond to the same economic springs and moral imperatives. Populations or groups are often stigmatized for practicing one or the other type of fraud. This article proposes to explain the factors leading to these two types of fraud, based on data obtained from a laboratory experiment. Because of its control requirements and its artificiality, laboratory experimentation can contribute to providing some answers. Indeed, by choosing appropriate parameter values, it allows for a direct comparison of the two types of fraud from an economic point of view in order to isolate the non-economic dimensions of decision-making.

Long-term care (LTC) is mainly provided by the family and subsidiarily by the market and the government. To understand the role of these three institutions, it is important to understand the motives and the working of family solidarity. In this paper, we focus on the case when LTC is provided by children to their dependent parents out of some norm that has been inculcated to them during their childhood by some exemplary behavior of their parents towards their own parents. In the first part, we look at the interaction between the family and the market in providing for LTC. The key parameters are the probability of dependence, the probability of having a norm-abiding child and the loading factor. In the second part, we introduce the government which has a double mission: correct for a prevailing externality and redistribute resources across heterogeneous households.

Income-differentiated mortality, by reducing the share of poor persons in the population, leads to what can be called the "Mortality Paradox": the worse the survival conditions of the poor are, the lower the measured poverty is. We show that the extent to which FGT measures (Foster Greer Thorbecke 1984) underestimate old-age poverty under income-differentiated mortality depends on whether the prematurely dead would have, in case of survival, suffered from a more severe poverty than the average surviving population. Taking adjusted FGT measures with extended lifetime income profiles as a benchmark, we identify conditions under which the selection bias induced by income-differentiated mortality is higher for distribution-sensitive measures than for headcount measures. Finally, we show, on the basis of data on poverty in 11 European economies, that the size of the selection bias varies across different subclasses of FGT measures and across countries.

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